"I remember meeting them very clearly, because...I watched them all die."

-Richard Alpert

"If we can do what Faraday said, our plane never crashes, Flight 815 lands in Los Angeles. And everyone we lost since we got here, they'd all be alive."

"And what about us? We just, go on living our life because we've never met?"

"All that misery that we've been through...we'd just wipe it clean. Never happened"

"It was not all misery."

"Enough of it was."

-Jack & Kate

So the battle of free will vs. fate and destiny continues. Actually, I'm not sure if I can phrase it that way, since Jack believes it is his destiny to exercise free will and change the past, which almost seems like a contradictory stance to take.

Jack is consumed with the idea of fixing past mistakes. This has been an essential part of his character since basically the first time we met him. He is so consumed by it that it has shown to be, at times, one of his greatest flaws. And here is another situation, where Jack can't let go of the idea that life should be tampered with to the point of erasing the last three years of history on the island (Really it's more like 30 since making changes now would effect the entire history of the island from that point on, not just starting in 2004), so that he can save the lives of the people that have died since the plane crashed.

He doesn't know if this alternate future is any better than the way things played out, but that's because he doesn't really care. Jack doesn't think that way; he is only concerned with fixing what he is capable of fixing. In this case, he believe he can "fix" the future, which ultimately to him means preventing people from dying. But is that the correct course of action? We can go back to the cliche idea when discussing time travel, if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, should you? Because that action would have unpredictable and possibly irreparable changes on the future. Yes, you would be trying to rid the world of a genocidal maniac, but at what cost? How would that affect the rest of history? It's the same situation here. Jack wants to prevent the people that have died since the show started. But what does that mean for everything else?

-If Jack prevents the incident, what if that leads to Dharma bringing back all the women and children? What if that means when Dharma is "purged", all of those women and children who were off the island end up dead with everyone else.

-Kate would spend the rest of her life in prison.

-Sun would leave Jin in LA, and they would never rekindle their relationship.

-Rose would die of cancer.

-John Locke would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair in a meaningless job.

-Sawyer would spend the rest of his life incomplete, unable to find the man who killed his parents.

-Juliet would continue to be a prisoner on the island.

And really, these issues are just scratching the surface of the problem, there could be much, much more severe consequences from preventing the incident that we can't even imagine.

Now, all that being said, we still don't even know if it's possible to stop anything. And considering all we have to go on is Faraday saying it's possible, and he then proceeded to fall in line with the rest of history by being shot and killed by his mother, how much credibility does he have at the moment?

I think it's much more likely that Jack helps create the incident, when in fact his inaction would have prevented it to begin with. He actually reminds me a lot of Locke at the end of Season 2. Locke became so convinced, based on information that he was exposed to (and consequently arrived at the wrong conclusions), that he completely destroyed the computer in the hatch that let you input the numbers, and only after it was too late did he realize his mistake. I see Jack heading down a similar path, only now Desmond isn't here to save him.

Some quick hits:

-Richard said he watched them all die. I think they kept that vague on purpose. Sun only has a picture of Jack, Kate, and Hurley. She mentioned Jin, but that was it. And no one even brought up Sawyer, Juliet, Sayid, or Miles. So which of these people is Richard talking about? And does he even know for sure that anyone died? Let's say they disappeared, and went back to their own time, but Richard didn't know it, and just thought they died, instead. It was a chilling statement for him to make, but it was made out to be very unclear, so for now I'm not taking it to mean much of anything.

-After Eloise got done talking to Jack and Kate in her tent, she went out and had a conversation with Charles. Did anyone else see him place his hand on her stomach? It could have just been an affectionate gesture, but it almost seemed to me like it was something you would do when someone when they were pregnant. Plus, he mentioned something about her going to the bomb in her 'condition'.

-I thought it was interesting that Richard didn't know why Locke had disappeared. For someone that has been on the island for so long, I would have expected him to be aware of something like that. Although, Locke in general seems to throw Richard off a little bit.

-So the Others went back to their old tents/huts after Ben and Locke left. I take that to mean that moving into the Dharma barracks was Ben's idea, and perhaps not one shared by Richard?

-Seems like we learned a couple of things about Dharma: First, that Horace is kind of a wuss, and that Radzinsky is higher up on the food chain than I first thought. It's still Horace's show, but clearly Radzinsky is in a high enough position to take charge if he wants. Dr. Chang seems to be the lead scientist on the island, but I don't know how much real power he actually has.

-Phil is so screwed. I'm looking forward to his death.

-Great dialogue with Hurley and Chang. I also really liked the scene later where Miles realized why his father sent him and his mother off the island.

-This whole Richard/Locke/Ben triangle has provided us with a cool little dynamic. Locke is trying to fit into his new role as leader of the Others, Richard is doing his best to accommodate Locke, but seems a little perplexed by some of Locke's requests, and Ben is the old boss, just sort of sitting back and mocking Locke at any chance he gets. There are clearly things that Ben and Richard know about that they haven't shared with Locke, which might not be a good idea, since this seems to be a much more educated Locke than what we saw three years ago.

-I listened to a podcast this morning which had a great theory...whatever map Sawyer was drawing is the basis for the map Radzinsky created on the blast door in the Swan. Fantastic idea, I hope it's true.

-We went through this period of time where we knew people weren't going to die. At the end of season 3, we saw Kate, and Jack, and eventually the rest of the 6 off the island, in the future. So we knew they weren't going to die. Then, we saw Jack, and Kate, and Hurley back on the island, so we knew they weren't going to die. But now, like Faraday said, any one of them can die. And I think the LOST writers know that we've moved back into this phase of uncertainty, so they can go back to teasing major character deaths, just like they did with Kate, making us think she got shot. Well played, writers.

-How do you get a 200-ton hydrogen bomb out of a tunnel?

-How awesome was the touching scene with Sawyer and Juliet on the sub, and then the subsequent ruining of said touching scene by Kate showing up. The awkwardness factor was through the roof, and Juliet looked like she wanted to take a gun to Kate's head and just put an end to it.

-Sayid brings up a good point. Jack seems to implicitly trust 1977 Eloise, and that is due in large part to him trusting 2007 Eloise. But wouldn't 2007 Eloise know that Jack trusted 1977 Eloise and use that to her advantage to get him to go back to the island? It's a bit circular, but needless to say I'm not so sure Jack is correct in placing all of his faith with this woman.

-Can Locke kill Jacob? Is Jacob even alive? Is he even a person? I hope he's thought this out a little bit. Ben seemed pretty floored by the idea as well. Will Richard allow it? Is there anything he can do to stop it? What about the smoke monster, does he have a role in any of this?

-Did anyone else miss the "We're going out on an adventure in the jungle" music? I know I did. I don't think we've heard it since the Oceanic survivors made the trek to the radio tower at the end of season 4.

Should be a heck of a finale. Jack's got a hydrogen bomb, Locke is trying to kill the "ruler" of the island, Kate's trying to stop Jack, we get to find out what our Shadow of the Statue people have in that big metal box of theirs. I'm also expecting someone of significance to die. Miles is probably the leading candidate at the moment, especially since he was able to reveal to his father that he is, in fact, his son. Kate might also be appropriate, since Jack is trying to prevent the incident to save everyone, so his actions resulting in her death would work; although I'm not sure the writers want to kill her off with still another season left in the show.